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Topic: FRED is awesome! (Read 5825 times)

FRED is awesome!

Though it's been over a decade since FRED2 was released, it's remained a robust and effective tool for designing quality missions. Especially with all the additions that the SCP team has piled on over the years, we've been able to do things with FRED that would never have thought possible.

FRED's versatility is a major strength. I'm a quest writer for a Unity-based free MMO, and I'm constantly hamstrung when thinking up quests by how little functionality I have to work with. FRED, on the other hand, gives you the tools to pull off all sorts of tricks with events, variables, and SEXPs to get whatever effect you're trying to create for your mission, and that's not even getting into scripting.

So: why else is FRED awesome, what cool stuff have you been able to do with FRED, what cool stuff do you think FRED can do that you've never got around to doing, etc.?

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

Re: FRED is awesome!

Indeed! I know Battuta has mentioned this as well before w.r.t. Bungie.

I did a semester project this semester in Unity, and did some level design/level scripting. I kept thinking on multiple occasions, "dammit I wish this were FS so I could just <insert SEXP here>". And I hated that scripts always had to be stuck on something when sometimes it made no sense... I had to worry about communicating between them and different instances and conflicts with other scripts and uuuurgh it became this huge mess. FRED's global context of the events editor is so awesome.

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

Re: FRED is awesome!

Aaaanywhooo... it's not just FRED. FSO itself is setup for pure win when it comes to game design (roughly within the confines of space-shooter). FRED gets open access to almost all of FSO's data which is easily swapped around and messed with in real-time with scripts/FRED. Honestly, I think one of the best ways to see what FRED/FSO is truly capable of is to play just about any release of JAD, but especially the more recent ones.

Re: FRED is awesome!

1) Sit down and do the walkthrough.2) Congratulations, you are now a FREDder.

For all the little niggles and issues FRED might have, you can learn about 90% of what you need to do to use it in a few hours. I've never heard of anything even remotely as easy to learn which isn't hugely limited in what you can achieve with it. I'm firmly of the belief that it is this very ease of use that made sure the community survived in such good health until the source code was released. Sure you can mod other space sims, but they tend to be so specialised that many talented people get quickly discouraged.

That's something I wanted to keep when I wrote the Diaspora walkthrough. I wanted the new people trying it to think "Hey, I wrote a working mission in about 2 hours! Maybe I can make my own ideas for cool missions into something real."

Re: FRED is awesome!

On topic: Yeah, FRED has a unique combination of being easy to use and very powerful.Compared to other powerful mission editors, the only ones I have used that come close in terms of ease of use are Blizzard's mission editors.I can't speak for Starcraft 2's tools, but StarEdit and WorldEdit were both super easy to learn and work with for their time. Disregarding Warcraft 3's WorldEdit modding abilities (FSO's equivalent usually involves opening a text editor), when it come to rigging mission events, FRED is so much cleaner to use in most cases.

Re: FRED is awesome!

Yo I didn't say that, there are better fredders than me posting right in this thread.

And yeah, I think Kara's 200% correct. The one and only skill you need to make a killer campaign is FRED, and with a tutorial and a few sample missions to look at, you can make some complex, sophisticated missions on your second or third go.

Re: FRED is awesome!

I think they did. FRED, and the sexp system, are both so open that they must have realized the potential in it while using it, even if they were under constraints that prohibited them from going all-out on the mission design.

Re: FRED is awesome!

I wonder if had any real idea of the power behind the utility they'd created to develop this little space sim project.

Probably. The existence of the walkthrough suggests that they were well aware of the potential significance of modding to their game's sales and longevity. Although it's worth remembering that FRED, or even FRED2, as V made it, was significantly less powerful than modern FRED2Open. Still good, of course, but considerably diminished nonetheless.

Re: FRED is awesome!

I wonder if had any real idea of the power behind the utility they'd created to develop this little space sim project.

Dear Volition,

I know you worked so hard on this FreeSpace thing, and must repay your efforts with choreographed disco music, shop screens with ludicrous prices, and increasingly gimmicky boss battles that go against all things simulation.

Re: FRED is awesome!

And yeah, I think Kara's 200% correct. The one and only skill you need to make a killer campaign is FRED, and with a tutorial and a few sample missions to look at, you can make some complex, sophisticated missions on your second or third go.

Forgive the necropost (I was led to it through Gen Battuta's signature), but I think that having a killer campaign also requires excellent writing. Having a bunch of events and stuff in a campaign is cool, but it's meaningless in the end without a sensible plot and dialogue (*cough* Freespace 3: The Search for Bosh which I totally know was a parody *cough*)

I wonder if had any real idea of the power behind the utility they'd created to develop this little space sim project.

Probably. The existence of the walkthrough suggests that they were well aware of the potential significance of modding to their game's sales and longevity. Although it's worth remembering that FRED, or even FRED2, as V made it, was significantly less powerful than modern FRED2Open. Still good, of course, but considerably diminished nonetheless.

Sucks that all that effort ended up in going out of business due to an awful advertising campaign